Probably everyone is familiar with the phenomenon: water drops cling to a pane of glass, if it is tilted out of the horizontal plane. Only when a certain angle is reached they slide off. This raises ...

1.1 What is friction? Take this everyday example: when a coffee mug rests on a flat table, the kinetic frictional force is zero. There is no force trying to move the mug across the table, so there is ...

As a simple theoretical model of a cell adhering to a biological interface, we consider a rigid cylinder moving in a viscous shear flow near a wall. Adhesion forces arise through intermolecular bonds ...

Researchers have demonstrated how to entirely suppress static friction between two surfaces. This means that even a minuscule force suffices to set objects in motion. Especially in micromechanical ...

Have you ever watched a mile-long freight train rumble by and wondered how one locomotive can pull more than a hundred fully loaded cars? The locomotive weighs maybe 150 metric tons, and each car is ...

Now I get to do something with that force scale I built. I had a request some time ago to talk about friction. Friction is surprisingly complicated. When two surfaces rub against each other, why is ...

A new model of the slipperiness of ice suggests that a layer of disordered ice forms underneath a sliding object. The model was developed by Bo Persson of Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, and it ...

Nanomachines will depend on our knowledge of friction, heat transfer and energy dissipation at the atomic level for their very survival. In the scramble to revolutionize the world with nanotechnology ...